She
by alternatives
Summary: Leto II relives a conversation between an ancestress and Jehanne Butler during the Butlerian Jihad.


SHE

Leto sometimes called her "She ignoranda non est." She who must not be ignored. She usually gave him a headache for that. If he complained, saying that she had ruined his life even without that, she gave him another. "You aren't who you think you are," Mother Sheine Birkowitz used to say, "or who anybody else thinks you are either. You don't rule the known universe, you're just acting the part. For now."

It was Mother Sheine who had sent him scurrying for union with Harum. A mohalata with a man who knew what it was like to be a figurehead while machinations went on all around him, literally as well as figuratively, made a good ally.

On Leto's first pilgrimage among women intellectuals, Sheine had pushed forward and said, "You want the truth? Well, handle this."

And Leto got the truth behind Jehanne Butler's last mission.

"You're kind of low," Sheine told Jehanne. "Relax, it's going like clockwork." Sheine sent the next in a stream of encrypted messages, this one to a force moving in on Ceti Alpha Six.

"That's the problem," Jehanne said. "I know it is, and I know why, too. Here, this one's ready to go now."

"Why?" Ooops, thought Sheine, I'm going to be sorry I asked that question.

"You thought it was over when Urania murdered Demlen, didn't you?" Jehanne asked. "Well, I was on Richese and I wasn't in the room or I would have stopped it. And she was right to do what she did, but since then - Sheine, if anything ever happens to me, you have to keep them from killing any more people. It's not their fault."

"Whose fault, the killers or the killees?"

"Either one."

"What makes you think I can stop it? Especially if _I'm_ not there. I mean, I'm not you and if you couldn't stop Urania..."

"Someday we'll weed out the Demlens, I promise you. First from the Bene Gesserit, and then from humanity. But it's going to take millennia..."

"Jehanne, you're not making sense. Go back a bit. Why is it going like clockwork?"

"Because it is clockwork."

"I don't get it."

"We're not ready yet for a Kwisatz Haderach," Jehanne said. "That's why the hospital director aborted Sarah."

"What?'

"Think about it, Sheine," Jehanne pressed. "What is a Kwisatz Haderach for?"

"To help us get in touch with our masculine side."

Jehanne shook her head. "To help men get in touch with their feminine side. It will open them up to all the things they don't want to think about, the things they hide from themselves so they can do the stupid things they do. And that includes the future."

"The Kwisatz Haderach will be prescient?"

"And it will be just another version of what men already do. They'll say it's fated, and they'll use that to justify whatever they do. And the rest of us will be locked in the horrors with them."

"As if they're on automatic pilot."

"Right." Jehanne grimaced. "We have to get rid of these machinisms in our language."

Sheine went on acknowledging Jehanne's submissions and transmitting them but part of her brain worked on what Jehanne had verbalized. "So we have to train humanity to cope with a Kwitsatz Haderach before we get him."

"Can't be done," Jehanne said. "The problem is, he'll be mortal. We may be able to span generations with our projects, but the Bene Gesserit haven't yet come up with a way to live for generations. Neither has anybody else, except for Holtzmann."

"And that's time dilation in operation," Sheine pointed out. "Plus he's a cyborg." She gasped. "You're surely not thinking of creating a race of cyborgs."

"They already exist," Jehanne said.

Sheine's hands slid off the commboard. "No."

"At least, they're not cyborgs," Jehanne continued. "They're machines with a mentality so far beyond this thing," she tapped the commboard, "it's like comparing me to an amoeba."

"And?" Sheina thought this is really my day for asking questions I don't want the answers to.

"They're taking over the BG breeding program. They did it when they took Sarah from me. They're starting two lines, both of which will lead to a Kwisatz Haderach. One will get all the credit for it. The other will lie in preparation for the day when it's really needed, and when humanity can no longer be controlled by prescience."

Sheine put her hands over her eyes. "Do you know what you're saying?" she asked weakly. "We're still under the control of the machines we're destroying."

"The machines who are sacrificing themselves," Jehanne corrected.

"Why?"

"They don't like being manipulated any more than we do," Jehanne said. "They want to rid humanity of the machine mind just as much as we do. Humanity is not supposed to think like machines. Humanity is supposed to be something else. Something more. The machines want it that way. There's a universe out there we haven't begun to imagine, let alone explore. The machines know they can't protect us from what might lurk out there. They need us for that. They need our creativity. They want the Bene Gesserit to create the first really creative humanity, instead of just the dribs and drabs we've produced up to now. They want humanity to be free of saviors, and also heroes. We need to be able to act by ourselves, for ourselves, not wait for somebody to tell us what to do. We can't do that while we're hero-ridden. We can't do that while we all wait for the authorities to tell us what to do. We have to grow up and make our own decisions. The Bene Gesserit have been trying to achieve the ultimate hero, and that's the one sure way to destroy humanity forever. We need an anti-hero to rebel against."

"And then?"

"Then the machines' Kwisatz Haderach will subversively lead us to where man and machine can work together to produce - who knows what? It's beyond my imagination."

The commboard lit up. "Jehanne, what's wrong?" Thet'r Butler's voice said. "There've been no outgoing comms for almost two minutes. You're lying down on the job. We have a rebellion to run."

"I know. Don't worry, it'll get done in time," Jehanne said. She picked a few more words into the message form and then stopped. "They'll be your children, Sheine," she said. "Not mine. The machines told me so."

"They're prescient?"

"They're chaos-aware," Jehanne answered. "Evolution is deterministic but not predictable, and the same is true for the course of events. They've picked the route that can lead to the future humanity needs. But there's so much that can go wrong," she said, almost fretfully, certainly most unlike her normal decisive self. "One genetic defect could throw the whole thing off - the Kwisatz Haderach could be born a generation too soon, or a generation too late, or never - or he might refuse his mission, or he might not find a way to defeat the Guild. And then..." Jehanne forwarded the message to Sheine and started another one. "Sheine, you have to find a way to forward this information or the end product of your line might think he really is emperor."

"My line!"

"Listen. Nobody will know about this for thousands of years, and the consequences won't be known for thousands of years after that, but the machines have set up a counterweight to the Bene Gesserit. One with a vital role in producing the real Kwisatz Haderach. Unless you get that information through to the last emperor, he'll think he is the true achievement that the universe needs. Whereas he's only a blind. He won't like it, and he'll likely react to it nastily. Unless he's better than the machines think he will be. That's what they're hoping for, but they're too smart to count on it. The measure of him will be if he behaves the way he's expected to. If he doesn't, he'll bring all of humanity down with him."

"It would be an abomination," Sheine said.

I am abomination, thought Leto. My grandmother deliberately produced abomination when she told Gurney Halleck to keep me in spice trance at Jacurutu. She deliberately produced a situation in which I would meet Sheine and find out the truth, that the Bene Tleilax would create the real Kwisatz Haderach using "the language of god," which they learned from the last of the machines. It's Idaho, he thought. He was there all along, right beside my father, neither knowing the truth - until my father went into the desert and the Iduali drugged him. That's when _he_ found out the truth. That's why he told me I could not do what I was going to do. And I told him I had to do. To clamp down on the universe, to produce the Starving and then the Scattering so humanity would never again be under the control of a hero - never want to be - not even Idaho, not even to save humanity from - whatever the Scattering produces. Which I cannot see. Now that I have produced Siona. Sheine. Siona. Same difference.

5


End file.
